All Is Not Forgotten

by Wendy Walker

  When the professionals and the Kramers convened at the start of the school year, there was a consensus that the treatment had been enormously successful. Jenny did not remember the rape. She had returned to her normal eating and sleeping routines. Her parents were hopeful she would join the flurry of college preparation that dominates junior year—SATs, AP classes, volunteer work, and sports. She showed no signs of PTSD, no flashbacks, no nightmares, no fears of being alone, and no physical reactions when she was touched by others. Her case was deemed so successful that a military doctor from Norwich, who was conducting an ongoing study of the treatment for combat protocol, had asked for her records.

  There was just one thing—and that was the carving.

  How was school?

  Charlotte Kramer asked Jenny the question one evening in the following winter, eight months after the rape. The question broke an uncomfortable silence that was, apparently, present at any dinner when it was just the three of them. On this Monday night like the others all season, Lucas was at hockey practice. He was showing himself to be a natural athlete, and his mother had enrolled him in the holy trinity for suburban Connecticut—football in the fall, hockey in the winter, and lacrosse in the spring. This left Charlotte, Tom, and Jenny alone to bear each other’s company, something that had not been easy since the rape. Without Lucas’s adolescent chatter about the state of the boys’ bathroom at school, which of his friends liked a girl, or his flawless sports performances, the silence that had infected their house was always sitting at the head of the table.

  Jenny recalled that the dinner was her favorite, a roasted chicken, rosemary potatoes, French green beans. But she had no appetite—something she had been hiding from both her parents. She swallowed a small bite of food, then answered, Fine.

  Her father stared at her. I’m quite certain he was unaware of this, but Jenny said he’d been doing it since they returned from Block Island. She said she could feel him studying every muscle of her face for clues. She became acutely aware of her expressions, knowing each one would result in some conclusion. Was that a slight smile at the corner of her mouth? Maybe something good had happened today. Was that a twitch in her eye? A grimace? Was she feeling annoyed by their questions like every teenage girl at every table everywhere? And mostly was there anything there to evidence the unrest that she had not been able to chase away? She had become very adept at hiding it.

  She looked up to give him what he wanted—a benign smile. He smiled back, and when he did, Jenny said she could see the anguish that had lived in his eyes since that night in the woods. She wondered if he saw hers, too. If he did, they both still smiled at each other and pretended not to see.

  What Jenny did not know was that her father was not studying her face. He was staring at her face, that part is true, but only to mask the fact that he had again noticed her hand twisted behind her back, rubbing the small scar where she had been engraved like a trophy.

  Her mother continued the conversation.

  I saw the cutest dress at Taggert’s today! Maybe Saturday we can go and look at it? Unless you have plans with a friend? Any plans, sweetie?

  Jenny believed, and I think she was mostly accurate, that her mother had moved on quite nicely. Though her frustration with the tension that Jenny and her father created could be deciphered by the slightly higher pitch her voice took on in moments like this one, she was living her life as she had before. Busy, social, upbeat. Yoga classes, luncheons, volunteer work at the school. She never noticed Jenny rubbing the scar, and even after it was finally discussed in the open, she claimed that she could not recall the behavior.

  Jenny was not consciously aware of this behavior either, though Violet had asked her about it several times. It seemed to be akin to nail biting, or thumb sucking in small children. Something in her subconscious sent a signal to her hand to reach back for that place where she had been carved. I believed this to be the first indication that the treatment had not been as successful as the professionals believed.

  The story of what happened that night in the woods had been carefully crafted, and the carving had not been one of the chapters. Everyone knew Jenny had been raped. No one knew for how long, or in what manner. Her memory loss was ascribed to shock and emotional trauma. This is the story Charlotte told. Tom said nothing to anyone, which he could get away with, being a man. And Jenny had no story to tell at all, except that she had received a treatment to make her forget. She had been uniformly diligent in keeping this to herself.

  As tidy as everything had become, a different kind of monster had entered Jenny’s mind and body, stealing everything good and putting in its place a gnawing anxiety that had become quite severe.

  Sweetie? What do you say?

  Her mother wanted to shop for a pretty dress. Her father glared at her mother. No one spoke of that night; but from how Jenny described things, it seemed as though that night could be heard on every breath that left their bodies. Her father, she knew, regretted what they had done to her—making her forget. He wanted revenge, justice, something more than what they had, which was, even after all this time, nothing. But her mother never looked back. To use the analogy I gave earlier, the house had been repaired, and that was that. Given the choice between the tension that stayed within the walls of their fixed-up house and Jenny remembering that night, Charlotte was happy to take the former.

  Jenny had heard their fights from her room at night—fights that would leave her father in tears and her mother sounding “disgusted” and calling him “weak.” She felt that all of this was her doing, from her inability to exorcise the monster and go shopping for dresses. She felt destroyed inside. And she felt she was destroying her family. Jenny had not noticed the fault lines that were there all along. Children never do.

  She answered her mother. Sure, Mom. That sounds good. Maybe we can get lunch first. She forced another bite of food into her mouth.

  Charlotte smiled. Great! Then she looked at Tom with smug satisfaction that things were all better.

  When Jenny had eaten enough to convince them, she excused herself from the table. She took her plate to the sink and made a comment about needing to get online to chat with her friends.

  She went to her room.

  I think I’ve described Jenny in some detail. What have I left out so you can picture her? Long blond hair. Blue eyes. Slender and athletic. Her face was somewhere between youth and maturity—the cheekbones had started to protrude more visibly; her nose was becoming more angular. She had freckles and one small dimple on the right side of her mouth. She spoke eloquently, without the usual “um’s” and “uh’s” that teenagers use. And she was very natural in her use of eye contact, which is a skill that must be learned. Some people look too long before breaking away to look elsewhere. Others don’t look long enough. She had it just right, which is something we grown-ups take for granted, as we have all—most of us, anyway—mastered this social acclimation.

  Although she had lost her innocence (for lack of a better expression), she was still quite lovely and sweet. She described her thoughts like this. Her tone was flat and she was surprisingly unemotional.

  I sat on the edge of my bed and started looking around. There were all these familiar things, things I had picked out or helped decorate. I have rose-colored walls. They’re not pink, because they have too much red in them. That’s what the lady at the decorating store said. I can’t remember the name of the paint color, but it’s basically a blush rose. The bookshelves are bright white and I have all these books on them, though I don’t really like to read much anymore, and not just because of what happened. I stopped reading a lot when I was twelve. I think it’s because I have so much required reading now, being in high school. And they used to have reading contests, which they don’t have in my grade. So most of the books are either for school or they’re really babyish.

  I also have a collection of stuffed animals. I still pick one up from every new place I go to. Well, I guess that’s not really true anymore.
I didn’t get one in Block Island. I can’t explain why. I know why, but I don’t know how to explain it. If I had to explain it, I would say that I felt like doing things that I used to do felt like a lie, like I was trying to pretend I was someone I wasn’t anymore. Like wearing something blue because you used to like blue and you think you still should like it, but you just don’t now. Does that make sense? I didn’t like doing anything I used to do. I just did them, you know, went through the motions, because I felt like if I didn’t, then everything would just fall apart. Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them all on fire. That’s when I knew I was never going to be all right again.

  She went on to explain her decision. It’s shocking to me that people ever make this choice. But I am not a religious person, so for me, the only hope lies with living. Of course, the words “teenager” and “choice” should not be in the same dictionary.

  This is where I grow frustrated with the general lack of knowledge about the teenage brain. There is a reason teenagers shouldn’t drink or do drugs or have sex—or drive or vote or go to war. And it’s not because we tell them not to, or even because they’re too “inexperienced” to make good decisions. The teenage brain is not fully developed. It’s hard to imagine this when their bodies seem so mature. I’ve seen sixteen-year-old boys with beards and body hair and buff arm muscles. They look twenty-six. And girls with full breasts and wide hips and enough makeup to work a Vegas trade show. I won’t even get started on the fights I used to have with my daughter about what she tried to leave the house wearing, or with my son, who swears he’s not going to pick up six friends on the way to a football game and try to buy beer with fake ID cards.

  In spite of their physical appearances, if you could look inside their brains, you would not find a grown-up within a hundred miles. It is not inexperience that leads them to make bad decisions. They simply don’t have the equipment. Consider Jenny’s thoughts on that night as she sat on her bed:

  I closed my eyes and just let the monster in. I pictured him in my mind. He was like a blob of darkness, and I couldn’t really see his shape, because it changed as he moved. But I could see the roughness of his skin, with craters and bumps. I remember feeling him inside my stomach. It was like an explosion of that feeling when you’re really nervous, like right before a track meet, when I’m waiting for the gun, but a million times worse. I just couldn’t take it. I started rubbing my scar. I remember doing it that night. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to scream, but I knew that wouldn’t help. I had done that a lot of times since the rape. I would tell my parents I was going for a run and then I would run, but only until I was far from the house in the field behind the tennis courts at the park. And then I would scream and scream. As soon as I was done, like everything else, running, sleeping, getting drunk or high—as soon as I was done, it would come back. I wanted to peel myself off of me. This had been going on for almost eight months. It was just too long.

  Jenny had started taking substances to relieve her anxiety. It had initiated with alcohol and progressed to marijuana and pills. The pills she would get from her friends’ bathrooms—anything she could find. She’d been through all her own Oxycotin, even after the physical pain was gone. Her parents didn’t know, which is surprisingly common. They had noticed the change in her friends and a fairly drastic decline in her grades, but they were “giving her some slack.”

  It is unfortunate—no, unforgivable—that the professionals who advocated this treatment for Jenny—or anyone, for that matter—failed to consider the following: that regardless of whether or not factual events are filed in our memories, and even if, at the time of filing to long-term memory, the emotions have been muted by morphine, the physical reaction that is experienced is programmed into our brains. The Benzatral does not erase it. I can explain it as simply as this: If you were to touch a hot stove and burn your hand, but later were made to forget how you got the burn, your body would still have the fear of being burned. Only it would not be activated only by heat, or a red-hot burner on a stove. It would come and go at its leisure, and you would have no idea how to stop it. This is why traditional PTSD therapy involves a process of pulling memories from storage and reliving them in a calm emotional state. Over time, the emotional connection to the factual memory begins to change, to lessen, so that remembering the trauma becomes less emotionally painful—and the emotional pain itself can be reduced But, of course, this is hard work. How much easier to just erase the facts? Like those vibrating belts from the 1950s that claimed to burn off fat without exercise or diet. Trauma cannot be cured by a pill.

  Jenny had no memory of her rape, but the terror lived in her body. The physical memory, the emotional response that was now programmed into her, had nothing to attach to—no set of facts to place it in context. And so it roamed freely within her. The only tangible thing that was left from the rape was the scar from the carving.

  It is easy to say that she should have sought help. But she is a teenager. And to her teenage brain, eight months was “too long.”

  She went to her bathroom, opened the drawer beneath her sink. She took out a razor, a pink disposable. Using the tools from her nail kit, she pried it open until the blades popped out. She set them on the sink counter, then returned to her bed, where she sat. Waiting.

  Chapter Five

  I feel I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Let me go back just a bit.

  Tom Kramer was in his own kind of hell. The feeling that he had failed to protect his daughter haunted him day and night.

  It was completely irrational. We can’t watch our children every second of every day, and bad things happen. That’s reality. As a society, we have gone through various trends of protective parenting. It seems to me that it was the proliferation of information over the Internet that resulted in the last wave. Any abduction, any molestation, any sexual misconduct, pool drowning, sledding accident, bike crash, or choking incident was instantly known by every parent from Maine to New Mexico. It felt as though these incidents were on the rise. There were campaigns and infomercials, new safety products and warning labels. Babies could no longer sleep on their tummies. Kids could no longer walk to school or wait alone at the bus stop. It makes me laugh to think of my mother ever driving me down the street and parking behind other cars to wait with me for the bus. She wasn’t even out of bed when I left for school as a child. But that’s what people do now, isn’t it?

  There has been some backlash, the “free range” movement, admonition of “helicopter” parenting. The conversation is starting to shift from the danger to children from negligent parenting to the damage done to those who are overprotected.

  It’s all just noise. If someone really wants to hurt your child, he’s going to find a way to do it.

  The summer after the rape, Tom became obsessed with finding the rapist. With his family gone to Block Island, he spent his time looking. He did not see friends. He did not go to the gym. He stopped watching television. From eight to six, he worked his job, but the obsession only followed him. Being in car sales exposed Tom to new faces every day. Cranston is a modest city, but it has over eighty thousand residents. Add to that the fact that his employer, Sullivan Luxury Cars, had the only BMW and Jaguar showrooms in a sixty-mile radius, and you can understand that every day brought a new face in front of Tom Kramer, and every new face, to Tom’s mind, could be the face of his daughter’s rapist.

  The police had done all they could, within reason. Every kid who had been at that party was interviewed. The boys, in particular, were questioned formally and at the police station. Many were accompanied by an attorney. Tom had wanted all of them examined. He’d wanted DNA and skin samples. He’d wanted their cars and rooms searched for the black mask and gloves. He’d wanted them inspected to see if any of them had shaved themselves. Of course, none of that was ever going to happen.

  The neighbors were questioned as well, families who had all been at home, or out together,
or out with others. Every person had an alibi. Every alibi checked out. One of the neighbors, a twelve-year-old boy named Teddy Duncan, had gone outside at eight forty-five. His dog, a curious beagle named Messi (after the soccer player), had found a hole in the fence and escaped because that’s what beagles do. They dig and hunt and chase things. It is likely he was in the woods just before Jenny was raped. But he would have been on the far right side, not deep in the back, given where his house was positioned. He’d popped back out onto Juniper Road to continue his search down the street. He said he remembered seeing a parked car that looked out of place. What that meant was that it was not high end, or a massive SUV with sports magnets on the back. With some help from Parsons and Google images, Teddy was able to conclude that the car was a Honda Civic.

  For most of the summer, this navy blue Honda Civic became the focus of the hunt for the Fairview rapist. Records from the DMV were cross-checked with sex offender registries and other criminal records. There were thousands of blue Civics in the state of New York. And Teddy Duncan only “thought” the plates were New York white and blue. Incidentally, before your mind starts to go off in the wrong direction, Teddy found the dog at a neighbor’s house and was back inside his own house by nine fifteen. And he is twelve.

  Detective Parsons did an adequate job, given his skill level. He was not lacking enthusiasm in the beginning, and indeed seemed “civilian” in the way the facts of the rape piqued his interest. But his focus was always turned outside Fairview. He reached out to police stations across the region, inquiring about similar rapes—teenage girl, ski mask, no physical evidence left at the scene, blue Civic. And, of course, the carving on her back. Dozens of other rapes matched some of the fact pattern. None of them matched all of it. His colleagues in other departments promised to keep an eye out. The trouble was that the rapists who had been caught were all in prison. And the ones who were not caught could not be traced. It’s hard to know how many women are raped, because it is the most underreported violent crime in the United States. But experts estimate that only 25 percent of reported rapes actually get solved. Things were not looking good for Jenny’s case, and by Christmas, Tom was the sole driving force in his tireless quest for justice.